Peter Diamond - 09 - The Secret Hangman (8 page)
T
he disappointment was huge. Truly challenging crimes are rare. You might get four or five in a career. Sure, there were questions to be answered, but they were just for the record. All the impetus had gone. He’d fallen prey to wishful thinking.
Back to reality. He stuffed his week’s washing into the machine and switched on. Ten minutes into the cycle he realised there was something amiss with reality. His thoughts weren’t fully on the job and he hadn’t put in any soap powder. He’d made this mistake before. Adding the tablets now was no use. They’d still be sitting in the dispenser when the wash finished. And if he opened the door – as he had a couple of times – he got water all over his kitchen floor. He’d just have to wait until this soap-less wash was through.
He left it running and went to his overladen bookshelves in the front room, where the biographies of Scotland Yard’s finest, men like Fred Cherrill and Bob Fabian, kept company with his eighty-three-volume set of
Notable British Trials
, the most valuable possession he had. Reading about old murders could be therapeutic when he was hard pressed on his own investigations, reminding him that sometimes good sleuthing brought a result.
Some of those shelves dipped dangerously in the middle. He kept telling himself he would thin the books out, but he hated throwing them away. There was a whole row of Agatha Christies that Steph had collected. He hoped to find someone who would appreciate them.
He picked a book that had him absorbed until the wash was ready for its second try. The case was an old one, dating back to 1864, and so intriguing that he almost forgot the tablets again. And when he reached one footnote, he recalled a recent conversation, and smiled. His thoughts had turned to someone else who would be interested.
Later, he went to the computer that he still thought of as Steph’s, because she’d made the most use of it, contacting her friends and finding out the details of films she wanted to see.
The machine started all right, but wasn’t receiving e-mail, which meant he couldn’t send it either. He tried various options on the keyboard and then a message appeared suggesting he phoned his server. They must have given him up for dead, or decided he was a deserter. He dialled the number and found himself listening to syrupy music until his ear ached. A voice broke in occasionally to tell him he was in a queue. And paying for it, he thought.
Finally he got through to a living individual.
‘You don’t seem to have used it lately,’ the woman on the line said.
‘But you’re getting my money each month,’ he told her. ‘It’s on direct debit.’
‘No problem,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, “No problem”? I’m telling you there is a problem.’
‘Sir, if you wait a few minutes,’ she told him, ‘you’ll receive whatever has come in since you last opened your mail. There’s quite a lot of it.’
‘All junk, or spam, or whatever you call it,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother.’
‘I have to send it to reactivate the service.’
‘All I want is to send an e-mail myself.’
When the avalanche arrived and the little counter logged up something over six hundred messages, he could tell at a glance that he’d not deprived himself of much. Ignoring the invitations to improve his sex life unimaginably, he clicked
create mail
and typed in Paloma’s address, copying it from the card she’d handed him. Surprise me with a really unusual request, she’d said.
He kept the message terse.
How about a Muller cut-down?
Didn’t even add his name at the end. She’d see it was from Diamond when she downloaded.
This had to qualify as an unusual fashion item. Franz Müller, he’d learned from the book, had been the first train murderer in Britain. He was a young German tailor. One foggy evening in July, 1864, he’d stepped into a railway compartment and sat opposite an old man wearing a gold watch and chain. The temptation was too great. Müller battered the old man senseless with his own walking stick, relieved him of the watch and his gold-rimmed glasses and pushed him out. The victim was found on the line between Hackney Wick and Bow. He died soon after. But Müller made a critical error when leaving the train. He mistook the old man’s black top hat for his own and left his own hat behind with the victim’s stick and bag.
Within twenty minutes a reply came from Paloma.
Is that Müller or Miller?
She hasn’t heard of it, he thought. She’d also added a PS.
This might be easier if we use a chatline. Are you on one?
Good suggestion, he thought. Steph once used a chatroom to reach her friends. He went back to the desktop, found the icon and opened the page. Now what was her password? He typed in
Raffles
and it worked. Proud of his new-found computer skills, he put in Paloma’s address and was ready to go.
Muller is correct. Should have an umlaut, but my machine won’t
do one.
These days, a hair sample from the killer’s hat would have provided DNA evidence. In 1864, proof of identity was more difficult. Fortunately for the police, the young tailor had remodelled his own hat, cutting it down an inch and a half and sewing it together again. Neatly stitched, of course. But it was not the work of a hatter, who would have used glue. Franz Müller’s altered hat became crucial to the hunt for the killer. His cut-down topper caught the interest of the newspapers. And started a fashion.
Paloma answered.
There will now be a short delay.
He smiled and looked at the time. After twelve minutes came back the response.
It’s a style of top hat shortened, circa 1865. Am I right?
She’d done her research by now and probably knew the grim story behind it.
Perfectly. Your reputation is safe. This isn’t a fashion question, but
how about a Muller Light?
I’d enjoy that. Where and when?
He smiled. She’d fallen into his trap.
A Muller Light was an idea from the railway company to tempt people
back onto trains after all the bad publicity. It was a peep-hole cut between
compartments so that passengers would feel safer. It had the reverse effect
and put them off.
She wrote back.
I’m a fashion person, not a railway expert. My last
message stands. Why not come here about seven tomorrow and I’ll get
some in?
This time it was his turn to delay. He’d started this. Perhaps subconsciously he’d been pitching for a date, and this hadn’t been about Franz Müller’s hat but Peter Diamond’s suppressed desires.
He stared at her message for another minute before writing:
Just
checked my diary. I’d be delighted to come
He hesitated. Now what? A full stop, or a ‘but’ . . . ? Go for it, he told himself, and pressed the full stop key.
T
wo reports were on his desk next morning. The first, from the Wimbledon scene of crime people, had an immense amount of detail about hairs and fibres found in Dalton Monnington’s car, but nothing to connect the travelling salesman with Delia Williamson. He slapped it on the heap of papers waiting to be filed. Monnington was old news.
Dr Sealy’s report was just as predictable. A Post-it note was attached to the front. ‘Knowing you prefer it simple,’ the sarcastic little doctor had written, ‘the deceased died at the scene, of spinal damage caused by sudden suspension. It was like a judicial hanging except that the drop was longer, so the jerk of the rope was more than enough to dislocate the neck and cause instant death. There were no contrary indications.’
Not liking the assumption that he was ignorant, Diamond glanced through the detailed findings, but the pathological jargon only irritated him more. It was as if Sealy had dressed it up to demonstrate his superiority.
The cervical spine was disrupted at the
atlanto-occipital joint, rather than the more usual mid-cervical portion.
Cleverclogs.
He showed the note to Halliwell.
‘That’s it, then, guv?’
‘You’d better stand down the team,’ he said. ‘The pressure to find the killer is off.’
‘But we still have to report to the coroner, don’t we?’
‘You and I do that.’
‘It won’t be easy,’ Halliwell said. ‘We know sod all about Geaves.’
‘We know he was a callous bastard who walked out on his partner and two little daughters and didn’t bother seeing them again.’
‘According to Corcoran.’
‘Well, yes. It’s all second-hand stuff. We know he ended up in Freshford and had the reputation of a loner. Liked to do the crossword in the pub and speak to no one.’
‘Anyone who appears in a pub can’t be all bad.’
‘I wouldn’t put money on that.’
Halliwell dropped a small photo on the desk. ‘This is what I was telling you about. The creature.’
‘Found in his room?’ He picked it up. He could just about make out the shape. There was no colour to speak of. It could have been a black and white print. Small gleaming eyes, caught perhaps by the camera flash. Large ears, pricked. Some kind of snout. ‘Horrible. What is it?’
‘Don’t ask me, guv.’
‘A bat?’
‘Now that’s a good thought.’
‘I do have them sometimes. Maybe he’s a bat expert. There’s a fancy name for it, I’m sure.’
‘Batman?’
He aimed an imaginary pistol at Halliwell’s head. ‘Did you try running a full trace on him?’
‘He hasn’t got form if that’s what you were thinking.’
‘No, I’m thinking we can find more stuff about his background, where they were living and what job he did. It’s all on record somewhere. Run a check on the man. Meantime I’ll go and see the girls’ grandma, Amanda Williamson. She’s the best hope.’
Not so. When he tried Amanda Williamson’s home number, her recorded voice announced, ‘I’m sorry but I’m not taking calls this week or next. You can leave a message after the tone.’ Shot yourself in the foot, Diamond, he thought.
Maybe she gave her temporary address to Corcoran. He called him and got another recording. Whoever invented the answer-phone should be made to listen to recorded messages for eternity.
He believed in seeing people face to face. He drove to Walcot Street and was about to press Corcoran’s doorbell when he became aware of a young woman at his side, small, dark and oriental. She could only be Marietta, the Filipino child-minder. Her arms were full of shopping, and as she struggled for a door key a French loaf slipped out of its paper wrapper.
Diamond held on at the second attempt, inches from the ground. Not bad for the world’s worst catcher, he told himself.
But in handing the loaf back he knocked it against his other elbow and snapped it.
‘Sorry.’
She seemed to forgive him without speaking.
He felt for his ID and showed it. ‘I came to see Mr Corcoran, but maybe you can help. I need to speak to Mrs Williamson – Amanda. I know she has the children and she’s gone to a different address.’
Marietta shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, sir, this is not possible.’
‘Little girls? Sharon? Sophie?’
She shook her head.
He put out his hand for the door key. ‘Let me do that.’
‘Sorry, sir. This is not possible. I cannot allow this.’
‘I must speak with Mr Corcoran,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You go away, please, sir.’
‘Police,’ he said, taking her hand and guiding it into the lock.
She sighed as the door swung inwards.
The moment he stepped in he understood why he wasn’t welcome. Ashley Corcoran was on his back on the Afghan rug. He was naked and so was the large blonde riding him like a three-day eventer.
H
e didn’t check the time, but he guessed it was about ten fifteen in the morning. He hadn’t imagined this kind of thing going on in Bath when other people were sitting at their desks or doing the shopping. And his arrival didn’t affect the performance. The bouncing blonde came to a resounding climax. Literally resounding. She repeated ‘yes’ seven times, as positive an endorsement as any lover could wish for.
After the last ‘yes’, Diamond looked away and discovered Marietta had disappeared with her shopping.
The blonde disconnected and stood up. She was built like a ship’s figurehead. She spotted Diamond and padded across the wood floor, slapping the fronts of her thighs. ‘It really gets you here,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have a ciggy, by any chance?’
From the floor, Corcoran called out, ‘Who’s that? Who are you talking to?’
‘One of your muso friends, I guess,’ the blonde said.
Corcoran sat up. At the sight of Diamond, he put his hand over his crotch. ‘Who let you in?’
‘Does it matter?’ Diamond said, doing his best to emulate the blonde’s self-possession. ‘I tried phoning first.’
‘What do you want this time?’
‘To find Amanda.’
The blonde put her hands on her hips. ‘And who the fuck is Amanda?’
‘I take it she’s got Sharon and Sophie with her,’ Diamond said, trying to confine the conversation to Corcoran and himself.
‘A threesome?’ the blonde said in an outraged voice.
‘They’re little girls,’ Diamond said in an aside to calm her down.
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘Her grandchildren.’
‘I’ve heard enough,’ she said. ‘I’m off. Do you mind? You’re standing on my bra.’
She was right about that. He moved his foot. Her clothes were in a heap just inside the door. It seemed she’d stripped the moment she’d arrived. Whether she was here on a professional visit or out of friendship he didn’t ask. Whichever it was, Ashley Corcoran hadn’t wasted much time grieving for his former lover.
Diamond took a few steps towards him, allowing the blonde to get dressed out of his line of vision. ‘She must have told you where she was going.’
‘The noticeboard above the kettle.’
He crossed to the kitchen and found the address scribbled on the back of an envelope pinned to the board. Amanda had gone to friends in Bradford on Avon.
Back in his car, driving out of town, he thought about the effect this scene had had on him. He hadn’t seen a naked woman for a long time, let alone having sex on the floor. Strange that the experience hadn’t turned him on. Was he past all that? He’d gone three years without sex. Hadn’t felt deprived. Hadn’t fancied anyone. The celibate life wasn’t of his choosing. Steph’s murder had put everything into a different perspective. Was his abstinence out of loyalty to Steph? Partly. There was also the thought that no other woman could compare with her.
Steph wouldn’t have insisted he remained a lonely widower. One evening they’d had the conversation most couples have at some stage in their marriage: what if one of us dies suddenly? They’d agreed it would be selfish and unloving to deny the surviving partner another relationship. ‘But only after a decent interval,’ she’d joked. ‘I wouldn’t want you chatting up my sister at the funeral.’ He’d promised her solemnly that he wouldn’t trouble Angela, ever. Then Steph had said she couldn’t make any promises if some gorgeous bobby representing the Police Federation was sent to offer condolences. ‘I often wondered what “condolences” meant,’ he’d said, and they’d laughed and poured another glass of wine, and sudden death had seemed remote.
So there it was. Three years of the monastic life had left him indifferent to a spectacle that would have turned most guys into rampant studs. The blonde had been on the large side, true, but she was pretty, young, firm-bodied and happy to be seen. He faced the depressing prospect that his sex drive had run down like an old battery, not from overuse, but neglect. Did it matter, considering his situation? Yes, it did. He didn’t care to admit he was past it.
The address he’d got for Amanda Williamson turned out to be one of the seventeenth-century weavers’ cottages high up the steep hillside overlooking Bradford, higher even than the spire of the parish church. A woman too young to be Amanda answered his knock and was threatening to send him away until he showed his ID and said he thought Mrs Williamson would be willing to talk to him.
Amanda came out and they shared a bench in the tiny front garden. She was over sixty, dressed informally for someone her age, in a loose top and black jeans. ‘The girls are inside watching
National Velvet
,’ she said in a voice that could have presented
Woman’s Hour
in 1950. ‘I brought some DVDs with me. That film is over sixty years old, but they don’t seem to mind.’
‘Liz Taylor at eleven.’
‘You saw it?’
‘Not when it first came out.’
She smiled faintly. ‘What did you want to ask me?’
‘Would you mind if I tape our conversation? I’m supposed to type it up later.’
‘Do I have to wear a mike, or something?’
‘No,’ he said, showing her the small pocket recorder he’d brought. ‘Just ignore this. Would you mind telling me about Daniel Geaves. I’ve heard from Ashley Corcoran, but—’
She cut him off. ‘What does Ashley know? He never met Danny.’
‘That’s why I’d like your impression of him.’
She drew in a sharp breath. ‘That’s going to be difficult when I think of what he did to Delia.’
‘Try, please. I didn’t meet him – in life, that is.’
‘I can find a photo if you want. Give me a moment. I know where to put my hands on it.’ She returned indoors.
He clicked off the recorder.
He was happy to wait. A picture of Geaves would be a real help. He watched car windscreens catching the sunlight as the traffic crossed the town bridge way below.
‘It was taken at some nightclub. Not very good of Delia, bless her,’ she said when she came back and handed him the picture, ‘but that’s him to a T. Hardly ever smiled, even for a photo.’
No question, Danny Geaves had a sour-faced look. He was at a table beside Delia, self-absorbed. She had leaned in towards him for the photo, but he appeared oblivious of her, elbows on the table, his hands tucked under his chin.
‘Can I keep it?’
‘By all means.’
‘This is helpful. We haven’t found anyone else who knew him.’ He pressed
record
.
‘That I can understand. He wasn’t the sort to have many friends.’ She directed her gaze across the town towards the blurred grey line of Westbury Down. ‘I wouldn’t say he was unfriendly. Just a quiet man, harmless, I thought at the time. Delia liked him well enough at the beginning, and they seemed suited to each other. She was more outgoing and made up for his shyness, or whatever it was. But he had qualities she lacked. He was steady. That’s an old-fashioned virtue in a man, but my headstrong daughter needed someone to be a calming influence. She was excitable, you know, apt to do spur-of-the-moment things. Danny was . . . methodical.’
She made the word sound menacing. A picture crept into Diamond’s mind of the methodical Danny tying his strangled lover to the swing in the park.
‘To be fair, he did most of the parenting,’ Amanda went on. ‘He made sure those girls were up in time and fed and ready for school. I’ve seen him combing their hair while my daughter, bless her, was sleeping on, or pampering herself in the bathroom.’
‘Was there any resentment?’
‘On Danny’s part? I never noticed any.’
‘Arguments?’
‘No more than normal. She’d have told me if he was unkind to her, or violent.’
‘So what went wrong? Why did they split up?’
In a reflex gesture she pressed two fingers to her lips and then withdrew them and exhaled. An ex-smoker feeling some tension, Diamond decided.
He waited.
When the answer came it was no help.’Who can tell what goes wrong in a relationship except the people involved? I made a point of not interfering.’
‘She didn’t confide in you?’
‘We’d speak, mother and daughter, but not about him. It’s not as if he was hitting her, or something.’
‘You’re certain of that?’
‘She’d have told me.’
‘There’s such a thing as mental cruelty.’
‘She dumped him for another man, didn’t she? That’s what did for her in the end.’
‘Just like that?’
‘She went through a bad patch, needed lifting emotionally, and Danny didn’t see it, or was too busy to notice. He was doing all the caring for the girls, and she’ – Amanda sighed – ‘she had time to look around. She met Ashley, and then the writing was on the wall so far as their relationship was concerned.’
‘Ashley had a more glamorous lifestyle?’
‘The grass is always greener.’
‘Danny took it hard, did he?’
‘Difficult to tell. As I said, he was so much quieter than Delia.
You couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I can see it must have hurt him more than any of us realised.’
‘There was no outburst at the time?’
‘I wasn’t with them, so I don’t know for certain, but from what I knew of Danny he wasn’t capable of an outburst over anything. All his upsets were internalised. Seeing what happened, I can imagine that the hurt went deep. He must have brooded on it until it became an obsession. You can criticise people like Delia for letting their emotions run riot, but the quiet ones are the dangerous ones.’
‘He seems to have cut himself off from the family after the parting.’
‘Yes. I used to ask about him and she never had any news.’
‘Even if he was angry with Delia, you’d think he’d want to stay in touch with his children.’
‘Which is what I said to her more than once. She would just shrug and say he was welcome to spend time with them if he asked.’
‘So this wasn’t a case of a father denied access?’
‘Absolutely not.’
Diamond watched a crow glide in the breeze above the weathercock on the spire of Holy Trinity. ‘Did you ever meet any of Danny’s family?’
Amanda shook her head. ‘It’s not as if there was a wedding. That’s when you meet the other parents, isn’t it?’
‘Did she speak about his background ever?’
‘I think he was from East Anglia originally. He went to college and got a good qualification. I couldn’t tell you if it was a degree, but it was in zoology or something similar. He knew all about animals and birds.’
‘Was that his job – working with animals?’
‘Not directly, anyway. He spent a lot of time at home, on the computer, which was why he was always there for the children. But if you went for a walk with him he was very knowledgeable about the countryside.’
‘Was he interested in bats?’
‘What, flying bats?’
What else did she think he was asking about – cricket bats?
‘He was, now you mention it. He’d go for a late-night stroll and Delia would tell me he was looking for bats.’
Diamond wished Halliwell had been there to hear this.
Amanda went on, ‘They give me the creeps and I’m sure Delia didn’t like them. He was self-employed, he did tell me that. It didn’t bring in a fortune, but they lived within their means, and Delia was earning as well.’
‘As a waitress?’
‘Yes. In those days she wasn’t at Tosi’s. She worked at several places, hotels mostly.’
‘The Hilton?’ he said, sensing a possible link.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Getting back to Danny and his quiet ways, did you ever get the impression that he might be depressed, or even suicidal?’
‘Never. He was quiet, yes, but never depressed while I knew him.’
‘Mentally stable, then?’
‘I would say so.’
He was silent again for a while, thinking over what she’d told him. ‘It seems to me that your daughter picked two men quite similar in some ways. They both did more than their share in looking after the children, getting them up, off to school and so on.’
‘“More than their share”?’she said. ‘You’d better get up with the times, Mr Diamond, if you don’t mind me saying so. That generation of men share the household duties and take it as normal.’
‘Not all of them,’ he said. ‘Another thing both her boyfriends had in common was that their work took up so much time that Delia felt neglected. She was a friendly, outgoing young woman.’
‘Anybody’s,’ Amanda said. ‘You can speak frankly. I knew my own daughter. It’s in the genes. I was no saint when I was her age.’
‘And she didn’t realise how deeply Danny was hurting.’
She took in a sharp, angry breath. ‘Being hurt is one thing. It didn’t entitle him to kill her.’
‘Nothing justified that.’
His firm response encouraged her. ‘And the fact that he killed himself later doesn’t make him any less evil.’
‘I understand you, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but I’m trying to keep an open mind until I’m one hundred per cent certain Danny was the killer.’
She turned to look at him, frowning. ‘Is there any doubt?’
‘My job is to make certain.’
‘Why else would he have killed himself?’
‘That’s what I have to explore. Sadly it happens often, a deeply disturbed man killing his partner and sometimes their children as well and then topping himself. It’s such a familiar pattern that it’s easy to assume this is what happened here. I can’t do that. I have to try and find evidence.’
‘You can’t know what was in Danny’s mind,’ she said.
‘He could have spoken to someone, or written it down in a diary or a suicide note. Nothing has turned up yet, but I have to investigate.’
‘And if you find nothing?’
‘Then we report to the coroner and the court decides.’
The door behind him made a sound and a child’s face appeared round it at the level of the handle. ‘Gran, we’re bored. Can we see
The Invincibles
?’ She was dark, with large blue eyes.
Amanda was on her feet. ‘In a minute, dear.’
The face was gone.
‘I was about to go, anyway,’ Diamond said. ‘You’ve helped a lot.’
‘That’s the six-year-old, Sophie,’ Amanda said, and there was a note of pride. ‘I expect her big sister pushed her forward. Could you see her mother in her features?’
He wasn’t going to remind her that his only sight of Delia was after she’d been dead a few hours. ‘I think she takes after you.’